Instantiations sells their Java Business to Google

Google and Instantiations today announced that Instantiations is being acquired by Google. So this is what the Instantiations website looks like this morning :

In a first short interview with Mike Taylor, CEO of Instantiations, I found out the following:

Google is acquiring Instantiations’ Java business. The agreement includes all Java products, trademarks and staff

All Java products from Instantiations are not being sold any more, at least for “a while”. I am sure they won’t disappear, but for the moment all sales of licences and support contracts has stopped. All reseller agreements were terminated.

Instantiations’ Smalltalk Business is going to be spun off as a new, independent (privately held) company called (surprise!) Instantiations

The management team and technical staff of that new Instantiations will be essentially the same as the one of yesterday’s Instantiations

So what does this mean for Java developers?

Since I do not have any insight into the deal, I can only speculate. In the best of all possible cases, some of the tools will be open-sourced sooner or later, my hottest candidate for the first one is the GWT Designer, which is Instantiations’ tool for visually constructing applications for the Google Web Toolkit.

I am quite sure tools like WindowBuilder or WindowTester will not go away, because there is a really big user base out there. Many big shops do use Instantiations’ tools for boosting their productivity and improving the maintainability of their code.

Here’s what Instantiations announced in a mail to all customers of their java products:

From our new Google home, we will be able to leverage our Eclipse Java industry knowledge, award-winning technology and world class development team to continue advancing the state-of-the-art in software development tools. But first and foremost we want to say how much we appreciate your patronage and support through the years. Thank you!

How does this affect you? Please rest assured that your existing Support Agreement will be honored. Our highly responsive tech support team is in place and ready to take care of you.

New downloads for the Eclipse Java products will disabled for a short time during the transition. Please stay tuned for exciting new announcements coming soon on the Google Web Toolkit blog.

As in the past, you may use both e-mail support and product forums to address support issues. Please note the new support e-mail addresses and forum URLs below [not added to this blog post to avoid spam. We will notify you when they become active. In the meantime, please continue to use the existing Instantiations product support channels.

I will keep you updated as soon as I hear more details. We need to know more since we need to tell our customers about the future oft heir tools, so you can be sure we’re going to find out more.

So what does all this mean for objektfabrik?

For now, it means we’re not a reseller of any of these products any more: